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Tuesday, July 23, 1912:Did the ironing this morning. I’ve decided at last to get through with a book I brought home from school last spring. I studied at it some this evening. By studying twenty-five pages a day I’ll be though it by the time school starts.

Source: Commercial Geography (1910)

Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:

What could the book have been about? It doesn’t sound like light reading, but rather something serious . . . more like a textbook.

I found a hundred-year- old geography book, and was surprised to discover that even back then people were really worried about the environment and the deforestation of the US.

In fact, millions of acres of the uplands in the United States, now denuded of timber would best serve the uses of man if permanently reforested. Already the proportion of forested area in the United States has fallen almost as low as in Germany (Fig. 9).

Commercial Geography (1910) by Edward Van Dyke Robinson

This made we wonder if more or less of the land in the US is forested today than it was a hundred years ago.

According to the US Forest Service about 33% of the land in the US was covered by trees in both 1912 and 2012.

I just finished a book, Founding Gardeners, wherein it ended talking about a speech given by former President James Madison, in May 1818 – lamenting the rapid deforestation of the timber in the country! Some have used this speech to say he was the first USA real environmentalist!! Small world! ;-)

I was surprised to learn that Connecticut is one of the most forested of the US states. The problem here in CT is that it’s all cut up into smaller and smaller patches… estates… etc. Which has a considerable impact on the wildlife and life in general.

Wow, I wouldn’t have guessed it either. I would have guessed that it would be one of the states in the far north (Maine or Minnesota). I agree that it’s difficult for wildlife when it’s all in very small parcels of forested land.

Hello

I look forward to sharing my grandmother's diary with relatives and friends. Helena Muffly (Swartz) kept a diary from 1911-1914. She was 15 years old when she began this diary. I plan to post these entries one day at a time—exactly 100 years after she wrote them. I hope you enjoy this glimpse back to a slower paced time.

The header is a picture of the farm where my grandmother lived when she wrote this diary. It is located in Northumberland County in central Pennsyvlania about a mile outside of McEwenvsille. My father said that the buildings look similar to what they looked like when he was a child.